Co-Registration Builds Subscribership

Publishing an email newsletter is done for several different reasons: to help market a company (yeah, that’s us), to generate advertising revenue, to build customer relations, to build brand awareness or to help promote a special offer or event. The thing is, a newsletter is only as valuable as the readers who receive and read it. So how do you build newsletter subscribership?!

That, my friend, is actually an age-old dilemma, dating back to the print industry. We’re not going to get into all the ways to build subscribership (and nor do we confess to knowing all the ways!), but one that we’re going to focus on this week is the method of co-registration.

What is co-registration? Simply put, it’s a way for a subscriber to sign up for more than one newsletter at a time. This makes it easy for both the subscriber and the newsletter publisher — for the subscriber it’s a kind of “one stop shop” while for the publisher it’s a way to get broader exposure which hopefully equates to more subscribers. For an example of what this multiple registration looks like, go to TipWorld (now part of Topica).

How does a newsletter go about setting up these co-registration partnerships? Essentially there are two ways: pay for it by way of a broker or directly to a site hosting multiple registrations, or negotiate co-registration deals yourself, mainly by contacting the other newsletter publishers, in which the aim is to swap, rather than pay, for subscribers.

The paid-for method is certainly easier: you go to one place and pay, usually by the subscriber. Different services charge different rates, from less than a dollar per subscriber to more than a dollar. Some sites offer sliding scales — the more subscribers you get, the less it costs. Some examples of these paid-for services are:

ZMedia
ListWorld
Permission Direct
Everyone.net
WorldWideLists

Negotiating co-registration deals yourself is certainly more time-consuming and may not yield you as many new subscribers, but it has its benefits, too. The big one to all you shoestring marketers out there is that it costs you nothing but your time. The other big benefit is that there’s usually a more qualified fit for the subscriber between the sites swapping for co-registration. A co-registration of this type is more like an endorsement because, theoretically, a good newsletter publisher is not going to allow co-registration on his site of a newsletter that doesn’t at least meet a certain standard of quality. Likewise, a publisher soliciting for a co-registration is not going to ask a site at which she feels the readers are not at all suited for her newsletter.

So, while a partner-negotiated co-registration may not yield the same volume of subscribers as a paid-for one, they’re likely to yield a better quality subscriber…one who will hopefully find that your publication lives up to their expectation and who hangs around for a while. This will help minimize your “churn,” or list turnover, and keep you on a path of growing rather than shrinking subscribers (for more information about controlling your churn rate, visit our archived tip, “Watch Your Churn”.)

With this having been said, I would like to make you a special advanced offer. Web Ad.vantage will soon be launching it’s own co-registration page. We will be looking to swap co-registration with publishers of other newsletters, but only on a limited basis. If you are a publisher and are interested in this kind of co-registration swap, please send an email request to mailto:marketing@webadvantage.net and also send a sample newsletter (or link to view past ones) and the page on your site through which you will be accepting our co-registration. Looking forward to hearing from you!

FINAL REMINDER: We invite you to our Internet Marketing Resource Directory’s Content Distribution category to find more information on distributing your content online.

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